“A Guy That I Almost Considered A Friend”: 59 Stories From People Who Knew Murderers Before Everyone Did

I was at University of Florida with Aaron Hernandez. We had a class together and before an exam he asked me for a pencil, I only brought 1 so I apologized and said I didn't have an extra. He stood up and walked out without taking the exam.

I was friends with a guy in middle school who is now serving a 400+ year prison term for m****r. He k****d his dad with a machete, attempted to k**l his step mother who survived, and then stole his dad's truck and drove into town and started shooting random people with the gun in his dad's truck.

So, what was he like in middle school? Angry, withdrawn, pretty unfriendly. I was assigned to sit next to him on the bus, and I tried to be friends with him in my annoying ham-fisted way. Eventually we got along ok, but the friendship was sort of one sided. At times he was almost actually nice to me. He told me he hated his dad because he was an a*****e alcoholic. His mom seemed kind of messed up too, tbh. He had a lot of problems, even as a kid. He came across as very "troubled.".

My mom was going on dates with this doctor she met in a singles group. They only went on a few dates but they still saw each other often in the group meet ups. My mom mentioned to me how he was still going through a messy divorce and that led to them not seeing each other anymore.
Anyway, a few months after they stopped dating, he ends up getting into an argument with his ex-wife, shooting her, cutting off her head, removing her fingertips and leaving her body in a field. He ends up k*****g himself at his sisters house before police could arrest him.
Only met him a few times but I never got any strange impressions of him. Scary to think that someone who could k**l the mother of his children, actually dated your mother only months prior.

When I was in culinary school, I worked with a future psycho in a restaurant. We were both servers. We became good friends and hung out after work all the time. After I graduated, I got a job cooking in a very nice restaurant, and I got him a job there because he was an excellent server. I eventually left that job, and we drifted apart. Fast forward 15 years. His name randomly pops into my head, and I wonder "What ever happened to him?" I google his name. First search result was a news headline. He was about to get a life sentence for m****r of one of his kids, and attempted m****r of his other kid and his wife. Turns out he had moved to Middleofnowhere, Indiana and got heavy into m**h. When I knew him, he was a nice, "normal", hard-working guy. Very sad.

My brother was friends with someone who falls in this category, we'll call him 'V'. Nothing ever stood out of the ordinary with 'V', just a normal charismatic guy.

One night my brother was at a party with his friends drinking. It was late at night, like around midnight. He received a call from V, he was asking my brother for a ride somewhere. My brother was drunk so he said he couldn't do it.

The next day, we heard the bad news. V had brutally beaten his mother with an iron pipe and tried to make a run for it. It wasn't long until he was found and arrested for m****r. We still have no idea why he did it either.

If my brother had not got drunk that night, he could have been involved in something he had no idea about.

I work at a gas station. I used to work at a location by a bunch of hotels, and I worked mornings Monday through Friday so I had plenty of regulars who pretty much felt like friends.

There were two maintenance guys for one of the hotels nearby that would come in every day for drinks. One of them, my favorite of the two, was Hispanic, and he helped me practice my Spanish when he came in. He was so nice and fun to be around, and it always brightened my day when he came in.

One day I was looking at Facebook and I saw a news article that there was an incident at the hotel he worked at, someone had committed s*****e by cop when he busted out of a hotel room closet with a gun, because he was running after shooting his wife and her best friend, because he found out she was cheating.

Broke my f*****g heart. It literally felt like I had lost a loved one. And I was so torn about how to feel because I missed him and was sad that he was gone but I was never sure that was okay to feel because he was a m******r.

The other maintenance guy stopped coming in after that. I think he quit his job at the hotel. I tried messaging him on Facebook to see how he was holding up, but I never got a response. It's probably really unlikely, but if you're reading this, I know you miss Pablo. I do too. I hope you're doing okay now.

Yes. A kid that was in my English class k****d his girlfriend. He seemed like a normal friendly guy.

One of my best friends when I was stationed at Fort Bragg ended up getting into some sort of drunken altercation later on in his career at Fort Hood, went back to his house to retrieve a pistol, went back to the party and shot a dude.

It was absolutely insane to me when I heard about it because he had never shown any tendencies towards violence when I hung out with him pretty much every day for over two years. Probably drank a little too much, but he was always just a good dude raising a good family.

Last time I talked to him was three days before his trial. He ended up changing his plea to guilty to receive 25 years instead of life. He's at Leavenworth now, going on probably seven or eight years now.

Feel bad for the family of the guy he shot. He was a medically retired vet and didn't deserve to be gunned down like that. As much as the m******r was my friend, he gets to go home one day. The guy he shot never will.

I went to school with a popular guy, on the pro athlete team, but always kept to himself he seemed to only interact with others when he was playing with his teammates. But he wasn't awkwardly quiet or anything he said hey/smiled at others cool content guy. But then, He was on the news for k*****g his gf, gf's mom, and little sister (minor). It was a domestic violence situation until he decided to take things further I guess. Police found him walking down the street with blood all over him. It just seems weird because you know this person and it makes you wonder what made them react to that extent.

I sat next to a guy in high school, a class that taught basic drafting and such. He was a kind of awkward kid that seemed nice, he would make light jokes and such. (I barely knew him btw).

Well, one night he and his friend robbed a pizza restaraunt and shot/k****d 3 workers that were finishing their shift.

My brother went to school with two twins that later went on to k**l a woman together. He said they would both sharpen the classroom pencils, go round the room and stab the kids on top of their heads with the sharp point. Kids told their parents and soon they complained to the school. Not sure what happened after that but my brother said he seen them years later. He quickly ended the conversation as he felt very uncomfortable around them.

I was school friends with someone who had a relative that was like this. He reminds me of Ted Bundy -- charismatic and handsome, super genius and caucasian. A couple of women go missing and are presumed d**d, eventually they link them to him but have no evidence. He messed up though, and one of his victims got away. She was badly assaulted and almost k****d. They somehow put him in prison for life. Now he spends all his time in the library, and since he's a genius is probably more dangerous now than he was before. YAY!

I went to high school with a guy who beat his girlfriend with a pipe, and then beat/stomped her new puppy to d***h. The girl was from our high school as well. It was crazy. The girl survived, and ended up going to the police to report him. After he was arrested, though, she started posting all over Facebook about how she couldn't wait for him to be released, and she couldn't wait to marry him. I couldn't believe it.

I actually sort of have a story for this...

The speech therapist(ST) I used to see as a child turned out to be the prime suspect in a m****r case. Nothing has been proven but all evidence points to him. I was seeing him in 2004 and apparently this took place in 2001 or 2002 iirc. His ex girlfriend broke up with him and was seeing another guy(AG)...ST being the jealous type kept tabs on their relationship and often followed them out to places to a***e them. AG was also a creature of routine so ST had his schedule under control too, e.g. AG would take the bins out and go for a walk at a specific time every Tuesday night. One Tuesday night ST turns up, stabs him repeatedly then runs him over in AG's car I guess to leave the body in a state so that it looked like an accident as opposed to a stabbing.

When I found out I wasn't really surprised. He always seemed a little off, and would do strange things like make dinner reservations during our sessions. He definitely had an aggressive side which was a bit scary for 7-yo me. I just can't believe this guy was dealing with young kids like that just makes me really uneasy.

A guy, half a mile down my country road, k****d his wife and her sister one night and buried them in the yard. His son went to our school and the guy was constantly in there yelling and being crazy, total redneck. A lot of people thought he would end up hurting or k*****g someone. Also, his name was Bebe, like BB gun.

Somehow his property has since turned into an unregulated camp where truckers and people in tents sleep. Totally creeps me out. Saw a car broken down near there once and almost didn't help because I thought it could be a trap.

He was really nice and I had gone to K-12 with him. Never knew him to be the kind of person that would even get upset. Then I get a text a couple years ago asking "Do you know about X? Him and his brother k****d their parents"

Edit: I'm out of the loop on this one. Younger brother was cleared.

When I was in high school, one of my friends m******d his family kind of out of nowhere.

The day it happened, it started to get around to my friends that something went down at his house. This was before most people had cell phones, and texting wasn't a thing at all, so throughout the day, more and more people were contacted and headed over to the guy's (whose name is Andy) best friend's house. The first officers on scene got his name and his brother's name mixed up, and we were all told that his brother had snapped and shot their parents and then him, then called the police and gave himself up with no struggle. So we all got together, mourned as a group or whatever, then got up and went to school the next day.

Shortly into the first hour of classes, everyone who was a known friend of Andy's was pulled out of class and called into the office. Once we were all there, the principal told us that Andy was alive, and that he had actually been the one who committed the murders. Everyone was pretty shocked, this dude was a totally harmless stoner who never even really seemed to disagree with anyone, much less have violent tendencies. I personally went into my standard compartmentalization/disassociation mode and just dealt with it by going kind of numb to it. The funeral was really rough, they had an open casket viewing even though his parents were both shot in the face. Andy claims to have no memory of doing it, and what they've pieced together is that he for whatever reason went into his dad's gun locker, pulled out a rifle and shot his parents in their kitchen. It didn't look like there was any kind of struggle. His brother came up from their basement and he shot him at the top of the stairs. He then called the police and told the dispatcher that his parents were d**d, and when she asked who k****d them he said he had. He went outside and stood on the lawn waiting for the police to come. Once they got there, he went into a full on panic asking about his brother, he had no idea that he'd shot him.

He got 18 years for each m****r, I think, and was sent to prison. I wrote to him here and there in the beginning, but his replies just felt really strange to me. I feel a little bit guilty now about fading out of his life, but it was honestly really, really hard to reconcile the person I was friends with with the person I was writing to, the person who k****d his family. He sounded very stiff and hollow in the replies. I guess that makes some sense.

I keep up with the details now through a friend who still keeps in touch with him. He tried to escape a few years ago, the guy he was trying to escape with was k****d in the process and his sentence was upped to life. I check his profile on the Michigan offenders search page sometimes, but it makes me pretty sad to see him. He's gone all white power, I'm sure to save himself, which is bizarre considering how 100% anti racism he was prior to all this. I don't know how it's affected me really other than my senior year in high school was a little messed up because of it. There was a weird thing where a lot of people who didn't know him or weren't friends with him got really into the whole mourning thing, and maybe they took advantage, but they went to this group therapy thing that the school administrators had going for awhile. I had to have mandatory counseling, along with a few other friends, but I wasn't really into it and I had nothing to talk about.

I'm 30 now, and whenever it comes up (which is rare) I feel very disconnected to it.

When I was in middle school I lived a street over and went to school with a kid who's older brother m******d his parents with a hatchet, and sliced up his siblings. It was horrifying.

His sister was in my class, she survived...barely, she moved away afterwards. The parents died in the attack... she, her older brother, and the 6 year old boy survived. The youngest left the house while the boy was k*****g the rest of his family and wandered the street with hatchet marks on his body and face, eventually he walked up to a neighbors house and they called the cops for him. The boy who k****d his family attempted to run away through the open sewers away from his house from the cops. He escaped for a few hours but was eventually captured.

It was really strange afterwards. The front glass door had small bloody handprints on it from where the littlest one had tried to escape and two of the front windows had blood on them. The girl I went to school with spent a long time in the ICU. I walked by their house often to get to my best friends house and there was caution tape around it for months. Then the tape fell and no one did anything. I remember thinking that there seemed to be no justice for the family and that lives were so fragile.

The boy that snapped and k****d his family used to walk by my house every day on his way home from school. He went to Grissom High School I think so he was older than I was by a few years at least. He used to say pretty normal stuff like, "I like your dog." but in the most creepy way that once my mom even cried after talking to him. He wore all black, gothy stuff. His window at his house had like a pentagram sticker on it and some anarchist stuff. He lived in the corner room.

After I found out I cried pretty hard. I couldn't understand what had happened to my friend and her family. The middle school I went to went into a sort of mourning. I never saw that girl again but I hope that she is doing ok.

I hope that people don't experience this kind of things in their lives early on, or ever really...because it really messes them up the closer they are to it. I'm not a serial killer but I am a depressed person and I know that part of it was seeing the darkness in others so early on in life.

There was a girl I really wanted in high school. I asked some people, "what's her story?" They all said "oh she has a boyfriend that's in jail and he's coming out soon, if you talk to her he's gonna k**l you" sure enough I kept my distance but she kept chasing after me and talking to me saying I was cute. "Are you trying to get me k****d leave me alone." She eventually just left me alone and found another guy. I guess this guy didn't care or never knew about the boyfriend, for him it was a bad story. As soon as this guy gets out of jail, he shoots up him and his whole family in the middle of the street. This was seriously scary, he was on the run for a month and I thought he was coming for me next. He turned himself in and pleaded not guilty. What a jerk, the mom and brother survived and were witness that they saw him. Sad for the guy, He died protecting his family. The girl was next to me in graduation. I still couldn't talk to her, she looked so pretty with her lip gloss and curls. She was so happy that day.